Electro-optic systems are becoming increasingly attractive for processing and/or transmitting electrical signals. An example of such a system is a simple optical link where an optical carrier, modulated by an electrical signal, is transmitted to an optical receiver where the electrical signal is recovered. This invention involves a system, closely resembling an optical link, which employs a novel nonlinear electro-optic modulator. The system can be implemented to function as a mixer for electrical signals, offering several important performance advantages over conventional electronic devices. In addition, the system has several unique and attractive features when used for analog signal transmission.
Although mixers for electrical signals are widely available, their performance characteristics are far from ideal. An ideal mixer would have the properties of 0 dB VSWR, infinite port-to-port isolation, no harmonic and intermodulation products, wide frequency response, and no conversion loss. In reality, appropriate performance tradeoffs must be made for each application. While a large number of mixer types are available, it remains extremely difficult to optimize more than one or two mixer specifications for any application.